Hubert Howe Bancroft

“ O Creator, O Former! thou that hearest and understandest us! abandon us not, forsake us not! O God, thou that art in heaven and on the earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth! give us descendants and a posterity as long as the light endure. Give us to walk always in an open road, in a path without snares; to lead happy, quiet, and peaceable lives, free of all reproach. ”

“ In it many die, and much blood is spilt, and the battle-field is filled with dead bodies and with the bones and skulls of the vanquished; strewn also is the face of the earth with the hairs of the head of warriors that rot; but this they fear not, for they know that their souls go to the house of the sun. And there they honor the sun with joyful voices, and suck the various flowers with great delight; there all the stout and valiant ones that died in war are glorified and extolled ”

“ O our Lord, protector of all, most valiant and most kind, what is this? Thine anger and thine indignation, does it glory or delight in hurling the stone and arrow and spear? The fire of the pestilence, made exceeding hot, is upon thy nation, as a fire in a hut, burning and smoking, leaving nothing upright or sound. The grinders of thy teeth are employed, and thy bitter whips upon the miserable of thy people, who have become lean and of little substance, even as a hollow green cane. ”

“ Have mercy also, O Lord, upon the poor and very miserable, who have nothing to eat, nor to cover themselves withal, nor a place to sleep, who do not know what thing a happy day is, whose days pass altogether in pain, affliction, and sadness. Than this, were it not better, O Lord, if thou should forget to have mercy upon the soldiers and upon the men of war, whom thou wilt have need of sometime; behold it is better to die in war and go to serve food and drink in the house of the sun, than to die in this pestilence and descend to hades. ”

“ Where hills were not found conveniently situated for purposes of worship, they seem to have been counterfeited after man's feeble fashion: from high-place and mound, from pyramid and teocalli, since the morning stars sang together, the smoke of the altar and the censer has not ceased to ascend. But the day begins to broaden out, and the mists of the morning flee away; though the hills be not lowered, God is lifted up. Yet they have their glory and their charm still even to us, and to the savage they often appear as the result of a special and several creation. ”

“ The bright rivers, sunny slopes, and green forests of the Euroc paradise are separated from the earth by a deep chasm, which good and wicked alike must cross on a thin, slippery pole. The former soon reach the goal, aided, doubtless, by the good spirit, as well as by the fire lighted on the grave by mourning friends, but the wicked man has to falter unaided along the shivering bridge; 524 and many are the nights that pass before his friends venture to dispense with the beacon, lest the soul miss the path, and fall into the dark abyss. ”

“ The Chipewas in North America call December the month of the small spirit, and January that of the great spirit. The Mexican festival of this month represented the character of the entering season, and the new state of nature. The cold sets in, the mountains are covered with snow, the ground dries up, the plants search in vain for their nourishment, many trees lose their foliage—in a word, nature seems dead. And so it happened with their god. The priests prepared his image of various seeds kneaded with the blood of sacrificed children. ”

“ Those weird tales which to us are puerility or poetry, according as we please to regard them, were to their believers history, science, and religion. Yet this effort, which continues from the beginning to the end, is not valueless; in it is embodied the soul of human progress. Without mythology, the only door at once to the ideal and inner life of primitive peoples and to their heroic and historic past would be forever closed to us. ”

“ There is a rush, and a trampling, and despite a rain of blows, all the pole with its hanging ropes is aswarm with climbers, thrusting each other down. The first youth at the top seizes the idol of dough; he takes the shield and the arrows and the darts and the stick atalt for throwing the darts; he takes the tamales from the head of the statue, crumbles them up, and throws the crumbs with the plumes of the image down into the crowd; the securing of which crumbs and plumes is a new occasion for shouting and scrambling and fisticuffs among the multitude. ”

“ This is a great dignity for the stout and valiant ones that died in war; for this they are drunken with delight, keeping no account of night, nor day, nor years, nor times; their joy and their wealth is without end; the nectarous flowers they sip never fade, and for the desire thereof men of high descent strengthen themselves to die. In conclusion, I entreat thee, O Lord, that art our lord most clement, our emperor most invincible, to see good that those that die in this war be received with bowels of pity and love by our father the sun, and our mother the earth ”

“ The sun wearies us with his great heat, the air with its coldness, and the frost with its torment. All these things afflict and grieve our miserable earthen bodies; hunger is lord over us, and we can do nothing against it. My well-beloved, I pray thee to visit us since thou art a valorous woman and a lady, since thou art settled forever in the place of delight and blessedness, there to live and be forever with our Lord. Thou seest him with thine eyes, thou speakest to him with thy tongue, pray to him for us, entreat him that he favor us, and therewith we shall be at rest. ”

“ And so, by these creations of fancy, the imagination expands; in the embodiment of the idea, the mind enlarges with its own creation. Then yet bolder metaphors are thrown off like soap-bubbles, which no sooner take form in words than they are also deified. Thus soul and thought and speech act and react on one another, all the evolutions of conception seeking vent in sound or speculation; and thus language, the expression of mind, and mythology, the expression of soul, become the exponents of divine humanity.
But what then is Language, what is Myth, and whence are they? ”

“ These legends tell us that the world existed at first as a great ocean frequented only by an immense Bird, the beating of whose wings was thunder, and its glance lightning. This great flying monster descended and touched the waters, upon which the earth rose up and appeared above them; it touched the earth, and therefrom came every living creature—except the Tinneh, who owe their origin to a Dog. Therefore it is that to this day a dog's flesh is an abomination to the Tinneh, as are also all who eat such flesh. ”

“ Scatter the riches and the prosperity of thy treasures, let the timbrels of joy be shaken that are the staves of the gods of water, let them take their sandals of india-rubber that they may walk with swiftness. Give succor, O Lord, to our lord, the god of the earth, at least with one shower of water, for when he has water he creates and sustains us. See good, O Lord, to invigorate the corn, and the other foods, much wished for and much needed, now sown and planted; for the ridges of the earth suffer sore need and anguish from lack of water. ”

“ But the polished Greek, poetic, refined, full of ideas, exulting in his strong, beautiful, immoral gods, and making his art immortal by his sublime representations of them, presents a picture very different from the Aztec, phlegmatic, bloody-minded, ferocious, broken in body and in spirit by the excesses of his worship, overshadowed by countless terrors of the imagination, quaking continually before gods who feast on his flesh and blood. ”

“ In the idea of this perilous journey, this road beset with many dangers—storms, monsters, deep waters, and whirlpools—we may trace a belief in future retribution, for though the majority of travelers manage to reach their destination having only suffered more or less maltreatment by the way, yet many a solitary, ill-provided wanderer is overwhelmed and prevented from doing so. In exceptional cases, the perils of this valley of the shadow of death are avoided by the intervention of a friendly deity who, Hermes-like, bears the weary soul straight to its rest. ”

“ For it was reported of old by the ancients that when night began in the upper world the sun began to shine through hades, and that thereupon the dead rose up from their sleep and bore his shining litter through their domain. At this hour too the celestial women, released from their duty in heaven, scattered and poured down through the air upon the earth, where, with a touch of the dear nature that makes the world kin, they are described as looking for spindles to spin with, and shuttles to weave with, and all the old furniture and implements of their house-wifely pride. ”

“ Why is it that all nations or tribes select from nature some object which they hold to be sacred, and which they venerate as deity? It is the opinion of Herbert Spencer that "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still existing, and to be capable of working good or evil to their descendants." It is the universal custom with savage tribes, as the character of their members becomes developed, to drop the real name of individuals and to fix upon them the attribute of some external object, by whose name only they are afterwards known. ”

“ It is a fearful thing to see the anguish of it demanding somewhat to eat; this hunger is intense as burning fire, flinging out sparks. Lord, let the thing happen that many years ago we have heard said by the old men and women that have passed away from us, let the heavens fall on us and the demons of the air come down, the Izitzimites, who are to come to destroy the earth with all that dwell on it; let darkness and obscurity cover the whole world, and the habitation of men be nowhere found therein. ”

“ Do thine eyes lower themselves at all in any heed of the miserable disenchanted victim left crouching, humbled on his desecrated rock, his nights and days of fasting and weariness gone for naught, his dreams, his hopes dissipated, scattered like dust at the trailing of thy robes? And for thee, poor Yáppan, the troubles of this life are soon to end; Yáotl, the enemy, has not seen all these things for nothing; he, at least, has not borne hunger and thirst and weariness, has not watched and waited in vain. ”

“ The following is a prayer to the same deity, under his names Tezcatlipuca and Yoalliehecatl, for succor against poverty: O our Lord, protector most strong and compassionate, invisible, and impalpable, thou art the giver of life; lord of all, and lord of battles, I present myself here before thee to say some few words concerning the need of the poor people, the people of none estate nor intelligence. When they lie down at night they have nothing, nor when they rise up in the morning; the darkness and the light pass alike in great poverty. ”

“ The offended sun smote the eyes of a scoffer with blindness, the moon stoned him to death, and the stars constrained him to count their number—hopeless task that always left the victim a staring maniac. The shamáns do not seem to have enjoyed that distinction among the Aleuts that their monopoly of mediation between man and the invisible world gave them among other nations. They were generally very poor, living in want and dying in misery; they had no part nor lot in the joys or sorrows of social life; never at feast, at wedding, or at a funeral was their face seen. ”

“ The first and rudest form of belief is Fetichism, which invests every phenomenon with an independent personality. In the sunshine, fire, and water, in the wind and rock and stream, in every animal, bird, and plant, there is a separate deity; for every effect there is a cause. Even Kepler, whose intellect could track the planets in their orbits, must needs assume a guiding spirit for every world. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of self-creative or self-existent forces. ”

“ As the sun is the eye of heaven, to whom the heart of the victim sacrificed to the god of heaven is presented, so it is at night with the moon, to whom the same tribute was paid at the feast of Quetzalcoatl. ”

“ Whence arise belief, worship, superstition? Whence the striking likeness in all supernatural conceptions between nations and ages the most diverse? Why is it that so many peoples, during the successive stages of their progress, have their creation myth, their origin myth, their flood myth, their animal, and plant, and planet myths? This coincidence of evolution can scarcely be the result of accident. Mythologies, then, being like languages common to mankind, uniform in substance yet varying in detail, what follows with regard to the essential system of their supernatural conceptions? ”

“ Thou hast thrown thyself down the banks of the river and among the snares and nets, whence without aid it is not possible that thou shouldst escape. These thy sins are not only snares, nets, and wells, into which thou hast fallen, but they are also wild beasts that kill and rend both body and soul. Peradventure, hast thou hidden some one or some of thy sins, weighty, huge, filthy, unsavory, hidden something now published in heaven, earth, and hades, something that now stinks to the uttermost part of the world? ”

“ See good, O our lady, to cleanse and purify its heart and life that it may lead a quiet and peaceable life in this world; for indeed we leave this creature in thine hands, who art mother and lady of the gods, and alone worthy of the gift of cleansing that thou has held from before the beginning of the world; see good to do as we have entreated thee to this child now in thy presence. ”

“ Thy sister, the goddess of food, provides for those that go thither, supplying them with provision for the way; and this provision of necessary things is the strength and the soul and the staff of all the people of the world, and without it there is no life. But this hunger with which we are afflicted, O our most humane Lord, is so sore and intolerable that the miserable common people are not able to suffer nor support it; being still alive they die many deaths; and not the people alone suffer but also all the animals. ”